What do you like best?

I've used Bronto for nearly a year now. I've been impressed with its ease of use and user-friendly interface. The dashboard views provide a useful snapshot of overall account performance and activity, allowing you to jump to key actions within the application. With the multi-brand version of Bronto, switching between our two sub-accounts is very straightforward.

As the primary user of Bronto, most of my time is spent building messages, deploying emails, and reporting back to our internal stakeholders on performance. Bronto makes it very easy to build a message using a solid GUI interface, while still being able to add customized HTML content where needed. Deploying messages is straightforward. I like the built-in A/B testing options, though I would like to a more robust selection of built-in test scenarios and options. They cover the basics: subject line, sender name/address, message & content, plus send date & time.

For list growth, the available pop-up manager app (an add-on, but accessible straight from the UI) is useful and pretty easy for a single person to set up and configure without much coding and design experience. It is not as robust as some third-party pop-up manager applications, but it does provide a decent number of options to create a good pop-up experience to capture new emails subscribers. The pop-up has been one of the most effective ways to organically grow our subscriber list.

What do you dislike?

Compared to some of the Enterprise-level ESP's I've used before (Salesforce Marketing Cloud; Responsys), there are a few things I miss that are not on par in Bronto. The canned reports available in Bronto are decent for deployment/message level reporting, but getting to list or user-level performance has been a challenge for us. No customized reporting is available that I have found, and drilling down into some of the metrics and underlying data has been challenging. Particularly around subscriber bounces and complaints. I like to understand the data behind the metrics, and getting to that level in Bronto is not easy.

List management is something I would like to see improved. Bronto uses a flat database model for subscribers, rather than a relational database model. Every list within the account shares the same set of subscriber fields. For us, that means that consumer data fields and B2B fields are all combined into one flat structure like a spreadsheet, even though they have very different needs and uses. Being able to create separate data tables for the different purposes, related back to a core subscriber record, would be helpful.

Be aware, there are limited campaign and event management options within Bronto (at least from what I have seen). There are no built-in event or webinar management tools, which has been a small issue for our business users. Perhaps something to consider if this is a critical need for your business.

Integration with CRM systems may be problematic. We tried to integrate Bronto with our CRM application for business leads, SugarCRM, but our IT team was not able to make it work. Our IT team has had difficulty getting Bronto to integrate with most of our systems, but I am not sure that is a limitation of Bronto.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I consider Bronto a step up from a small business email application for consumer marketing, like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact. Its integrations with e-commerce platforms like Magento may be useful. The lack of some CRM integrations and event management may be a turn-off if your target customer base is more B2B.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Building the email channel as an effective way to connect with our customers, and drive engagement and revenue has been our primary objective. Consolidating email applications was key. Prior to using Bronto, there were two or three different ESP's in use across our company, between brands and departments. With Bronto, we have been able to consolidate these into one application, using the sub-accounts to break out brands and use multiple lists. We've saved money by dropping the unneeded email platforms and have a more unified view of a customer.

Next steps for us is to bring over transactional emails into Bronto, currently deployed through Magento and Netsuite, and add triggered messaging based on purchase and browsing/carting activity.

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What do you like best?

What I like best about Bronto is the easy email template builder. Drag-n-drop is the best and fastest way to build emails and Bronto has done a pretty good job with it.

What do you dislike?

As much as I like the drag-n-drop feature for building email templates, I also find a few things limiting. You are unable to layer images or have images as backgrounds for text. I have also found that metrics are not as fast we'd like them to be; they don't update in real time. I also dislike the fact that you have to pay extra to host more than 100mb of images. 100mb is a very small amount especially these days. Finally, the fact that many important features that can only be enabled with add-on apps ends up racking up your bill and makes everything quite expensive in the end.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Overall, I think Bronto is a great piece of software for marketing and analytics. It just needs some tweaking.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We're able to keep customers in the loop by marketing events and other happenings. Tailoring emails to market to specific groups of customers is great. With metrics we're able to see our strengths and weaknesses and other areas where we need improvement.

What do you like best?

Bronto encompasses everything you need for your email program to be successful. We are able to segment easily and manage our contacts without any problems. We love the ability to test, test and test again. The real-time analytics allows us to be nimble and make changes on the fly or as needed.

What do you dislike?

The a la carte services such as Abandon Cart and Browse Recovery are separate charges. These are valuable triggered email programs and should not cost extra to our company. I would love to see more consistent training as well. There is so much to their platform that we are still discovering how to use. It would be helpful to have online tutorials readily available for all users. I could also like to see an annual conference surrounding email.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I highly recommend Bronto if you are looking for a vendor to help get your email program to the next level. The ease of use and reporting functionality is exactly what every marketer needs! The level of support from the Bronto team is top notch!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

The functionality of the email builder is incredibly useful. I myself don't have too much background when it comes to HTML coding for email, so having a WYSIWYG drag and drop editor is amazing. List and Segment organization is next on my list, as I'm currently going through and updating all of these...very easy to search and find information that's needed. The Web Forms tool is extremely useful as well. I consider myself an intermediate email professional, and the Web Forms tool is still intuitive.

What do you dislike?

Currently having a hard time getting New Reports updated on our end (not Bronto's fault, simply an internal issue on my side). Other than that, there's really not much that we can complain about. The customer support is excellent, the email designer is very intuitive, and we've never had issues with the actual tool itself.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Use their knowledge base as much as possible. Everything you'll need to know should be found in there. Additionally, find Bronto's channel on YouTube and take advantage of their free tutorials and webinars...there's a lot of very useful information there.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Easily customized drip campaigns, nurture campaigns. We've recently been able to restructure our email strategy to increase click rates and engagement. We're additionally seeing a continuous stream of revenue coming in from cart abandons and drip campaigns, money that otherwise would have fallen through the cracks.

What do you like best?

I think Bronto is worth it if you're dealing with a contact list in the hundred thousands. It's easy to create workflows and segments to make sure the right people are getting your message. The logic is simple to understand. There are some handy apps as well like the coupon manager and the homepage pop-up. Something cool about the coupon code manager is that it lets you add customized messages after your coupon expires.

What do you dislike?

The RFM metrics are a bit slow to update. It takes 24 hrs to update if you're using it for a workflow or segment. The only reason this is strange is because there are some other criteria that updates every 15 mins and deal with the same information. Not sure where the disconnect is there. Other than that, everything else is pretty solid.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Coupon code manager is great to use when you want individual coupon codes for special sales. The homepage pop-up is also a good feature. It has the option to a/b test different pop-up designs. It's been useful in testing how well a coupon to first time users works.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We're able to keep track of movement through workflows and see which messages resonate more with our customers. It allows us better hone in on the type of content they want to see. It's also nice that we can create different templates for the type of emails we send out so that way we show what is more relevant depending on the kind of messages we're sending out.

What do you like best?

This would have definitely fell in the ''dislike'' category not so long ago, but the new user interface has definitely improved my experience when trying to measure the stats of our emails in the delivery menu. The new features such as the ''heatmap'' to evaluate the performance of links and just overall better user interface improves what I thought was initially a bad aspect to Bronto. My initial thoughts were that I felt like the User Interface failed to highlight or give easy access to the main data. I felt like there were too many sub menus, too many ways to view various stats and the new experience definitely centers the attention at the right place and gives us shortcuts to access key data. We also just recently added the option to track the revenue for our emails and the implementation was very easy and so far the stats are accurate and properly shown. Overall, I really like the professionalism and the variety of statistics offered by Bronto.

What do you dislike?

One of the main thing I dislike, a thing that is also challenging with all kinds of apps we use, is that we are a multi country and multi language business. Even though it is the same subject and the same content (image wise), we set up many different deliveries and the process is not always smooth to after go back and add up the stats from different languages and different countries. It would be nice to have some kind of dashboard were even though it's different delivery, a specific board would show us the result based on a subject and not based on the delivery itself. Which means that for example, if I speak about bomber jackets in both french and English, in Canada and the US, that board would show me overall results regardless of languages or countries saying that the bomber jacket subject gave us this statistic. I would also add that Bronto has a lot of features we still don't know about, having more webinars, more training and more ways to look back at Webinars would definitely be a huge plus.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are an omni-channel business gathering emails from many different sources and Bronto so far eased that process heavily compared to other apps or other softwares. All the imports have been going smoothly and the segmentation process really helps us target the right customers which allowed us to really send curated content to these segments.

What do you like best?

Straightforward segmentation and automation rules. The whole interface is incredibly user friendly so it doesn't take long to get going. Can be used with zero coding experience, but also allows more advanced exploration. The help and support system in particular is excellent: I've never had to escalate an issue and even low priority issues get a response from a real person within two hours, even though we are based on a different continent.

What do you dislike?

The SMS functionality is a little undercooked. The dynamic code works very well indeed for people with no coding experience at all, but can be awkward when creating large nested-if statements

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure it is integrated into your systems. Ideal if your primary digital communications are via email.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Sending speedy and accurate personalised emails which drive conversion with very limited resources

What do you like best?

Bronto is a very reliable system that gets the job done with usability as a top priority. With the platform I've been able to quickly stand up behavior based campaigns using the workflow feature and segments. Generally speaking, the add-on apps are easy to deploy and do a great job of extending the platforms capabilities. Bronto may not be the most powerful ESP on the block but it is great for a team that has limited tech resources and needs to get a robust email program in place fast.

What do you dislike?

There are some reporting challenges, which they have been working on, and it could use some tighter site integration to offer more behavioral trigger optimizations. You can still do a lot with the platform but often need to hack together more complex customer interactions.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Understand if you need any of the apps when you are negotiating your contract to try to get bulk discounts.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It allows us to quickly deploy batch-and-blast emails as well behavior based trigger campaigns without requiring us to bring on a dedicated email technical resource like a coder or specialized email designer.

What do you like best?

Very user friendly, great interface! There are so many more options than we ever had before. The actual Email template is so easy to use and the Support we get from our reps is above and beyond!

What do you dislike?

Honestly haven't found anything to dislike! Occasionally I run into something that is harder to use, but that's my own learning curve.

Recommendations to others considering the product

We love the automated emails (post purchase, abandoned cart etc). Everything is pretty easy to use and if you have any problems, the Support is terrific.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are reaching far more people, have much better functionality, reporting and of course increased revenue. Our email stats have all really continued to grow and improve. Love having so many automated emails. No limits!

What do you like best?

The vast majority of ESP's offer the same benefits and features as Bronto. What sets Bronto apart, however, is that we have a dedicated Bronto account manager who is very responsive to our questions. I also like that we have the ability to chat with live agents whenever we have questions about the platform.

What do you dislike?

Bronto's Browse Recovery app is limited in deployment capabilities since it's can only be triggered in very specific scenarios. Also, their JSON script doesn't pick up category or subcategory browse behavior, which limits our segmenting abilities.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Launching Recommendations Premium has brought many benefits to our program. First, we were able to move our triggered messages off another platform with significant ROI savings. Second, we were able to better customize our rules which lead to an increase in clicks & revenue within the triggered messages. Third, we were able to add personalized recomendations to almost all of our emails and through testing we've determined that emails with recommendations bring in more revenue than those without recs.

What do you like best?

Bronto is an easy to use platform that provides all the insight needed for successful e-marketing!

What do you dislike?

There is not much to dislike as it relates to Bronto. Some of the reporting features have changed over time, so potentially a "continuing education" feature or newsletter could be helpful.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Bronto is an easy to learn platform and can be used by professional with little to much experience. Many of the reports and dashboards are easy to understand and comprehend. Creating lists and segments based on past email performance will only increase your efficiency moving forward. The best part about Bronto is that it provides immediate sales leads and opportunities by paying attention to recipient email performance.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The best benefit to Bronto is that it provides you an immediate understanding of your return on investment. Studying all of the data provided gives you a clear understanding of what is working and what is not.

What do you like best?

The workflows and automated EDM options provided make it extremely easy to produce comprehensive campaigns that allow us to ensure we're capturing as many sales as possible, and providing shoppers with a responsive and customised experience. The analytics are also very clean and thorough.

What do you dislike?

The email builder could be improved on. Whilst the structure is sufficient for basic emails, there could be far more options to allow for greater customisation when creating specific, more complicated EDMs. The current block segments feel quite clunky.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I would definitely recommend Bronto as an email marketing software for businesses looking for clean, simple marketing solutions across their EDM campaigns.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Bronto has allowed our business to really customise our EDM campaigns to cater to the wide range of customer behaviours that we come across in our business, and the feedback and results we're able to analyse through Bronto's comprehensive analytics means we're able to create the most dynamic and effective marketing possible for our brand.

What do you like best?

User interface is friendly... easy to navigate. Live chat is also useful

What do you dislike?

AB testing is useless. I've done multiple AA tests to verify confidence, and in half my tests there was a winner with +95% CI measuring RECEIPT... in other words... the recipient's email client rejected a statistically significant number of email A, when it was exactly identical (content, subject, send time, etc) as the email that was approved by the email client. My send list was 120,000... no excuse for so many tests to have this result. No confidence in an actual AB test testing subject lines if a statistically significant number of emails aren't even getting past the client.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If AB testing is important to you, find a company that considers confidence interval when declaring a test winner, and one that can segment a list randomly. Otherwise, you pay a lot for the few parts that work well.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We need to email somehow. Other companies might be better options based on what we're actually getting.

What do you like best?

I like the simplicity of Bronto's format and how easy it is to see how my marketing emails are doing in real time. I also enjoy the overall user format and find that it makes it easy to learn new aspects of email marketing that I wasn't knowledgeable about when first starting. I also enjoy the analytic aspects of Bronto that allow me to compare different email marketing strategies and quickly view their performance.

What do you dislike?

I dislike some of the features involved with viewing my recent emails for a certain brand based on naming conventions and how you need to click back and forth to change simple things like the names of an email or the see a preview.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I am solving business problems that come along with having a big customer base and not having the budget to always target customers the same way. Bronto allows me to break my customers into segments that are more profitable.

What do you like best?

Overall, Bronto has proven capable and reliable in the years we've been using them, with high deliverability ratings, and a robust set of workflow/trigger features which has allowed us to use a nuanced approach to acquisition, retention, and reactivation.

What do you dislike?

Since the purchase by Oracle, it seems as though more layers have been added to get approval or make progress on projects. To an extent, I understand given the corporate structure, but there are efficiency improvements they could make to improve customer service - it's not bad overall, but room for improvement.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We utilize Bronto for welcome series, transactional emails, trigger/drip campaigns to increase CLV and onboard new subscribers with a push to conversion, as well as our traditional batch marketing sends.

What do you like best?

The capabilities of the product and the support that's available. The ability to create workflows and the options for the rules come in handy when trying to manage who gets emailed and when, without sending our customers too many emails.

What do you dislike?

Not intuitive. You really need someone to help you figure out what everything is and where everything is, and how to use it properly.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure you use all the support Bronto offers. It will help you get it implemented faster.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use it to make sure our customer come back to purchase the items they need. I helps use with cart recovery, browser recovery, and newsletters.

What do you like best?

Having worked with several 3rd party digital marketing tech providers, I know how valuable it is to have a business partner who is responsive, reliable and willing to work with our business to get the best results possible. They are competitive in pricing and services provided. They make my job easy.

What do you dislike?

There was significant pressure to sign a 2 year vs 1 year contract, however this was not unlike their competitors and given our happy working relationship it wasn't all that much of a worry in the end.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Bronto makes it easy to create workflows that allow us to automate our email sends to best meet the needs of our business and intelligently target potential customers.

What do you like best?

Bronto allows the user to copy and duplicate multiple emails. This has come in handy numerous times when I've had to code out small differences between a dozen or more emails.

What do you dislike?

The search feature could use some work. I'm not sure if it works as intended or if it is just slightly inaccurate. Sometimes my searches for a date range will not come up in the results unless I also search for the title of the email.

Recommendations to others considering the product

As far as email marketing and analytics, Bronto does what you need it to do and a little bit more.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We frequently use the analytics within Bronto to test how well certain emails and email layouts do as compared to other ones. As an example, over 8 weeks we tested two different designs of the same email and sent email A to one half of our customers and email B to the other half. It turned out that email B not only had consistently higher click rates, but they were also purchasing directly from it. Statistics like these become invaluable.

What do you like best?

I like that the majority of Bronto's functions are quite user-friendly . Having never worked in email marketing prior to my current job, it was easy for me to learn about Bronto. There are also so many functions, such as automation, that we have been able to enhance our email experience for our mailing list in a relatively short period of time.

What do you dislike?

The biggest issue for us isn't so much a Bronto issue as it is an integration issue. Currently, we do not use a CRM or POS system that is integrated with Bronto, so we aren't able to use many of the wonderful functions in Bronto. With that said, I have been able to find work-arounds within Bronto that at least give us a little better picture of our customers. I would love to have a more integrated system so we could use Bronto's functions as much as possible. I would also like to see additional triggers/nodes for automation as that might allow us to increase our use of automated series.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Bronto has an incredible array of functions that can benefit your company. Just keep in mind that if your POS or CRM systems cannot integrate with Bronto, you may not be able to use all of those functions to the fullest ability.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Being able to see who is opening and clicking on specific emails has been incredibly helpful for us. Because our systems aren't integrated with Bronto, we are not able to see a true conversion rate for each email campaign. However, by looking at the history of each contact who places an online order with us, I can manually batch the orders according to which email our customers are responding to.

What do you like best?

Terrific 24 livechat, support documentation and personal account support -- very responsive and educated. The product is easy to use, intuitively setup.

What do you dislike?

eCommerce platform only. It's limiting for us. We need a tool that can manage a contact record with associated 'opportunities' or 'deals'. Right now we keep overriding needed fields. Unable to send dynamic email content overtime because import information keeps getting overridden by the last updated 'opportunity' associated to the contact

Unable to send timely emails because we use the FTP not API.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's a great, easy-to-use tool. It's best for eCommerce. Doesn't support concepts like contact + multiple leads or opportunities.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use it for marketing emails. We are able to send emails and manage contacts. Because it's built for eCommerce, it's not the best, most robust platform for our line of business. We can only use it in a limited capacity.

What do you like best?

Email design is somewhat simple. Contact management seem solid.

What do you dislike?

Most of our website speed issues when running Google site speed reports, GTmetrix, etc. are being caused by Bronto, and they have offered little to no assistance resolving. Transactional emails are very limited and difficult to work with. Cart abandonment is also very limited.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Some of our expectations fell short, especially regarding linking our website data to emails. (ie. Product images, price, abandon cart data, etc.) Although presented to us in early sales calls as something that was simple, it turned out to be very complicated and support was not very helpful. I would recommend working out the details with Bronto before committing, as a lot was lost in details.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Capturing emails and managing the contacts is somewhat seamless and always running in the background.

What do you like best?

Email drag and drop builder, automation is pretty competent. Plug-ins are very good, though would prefer if some were included in price i.e. Abandoned cart. This is an easy to use tool which can be very comfortably self-taught, though for advance users, training would be of benefit.

What do you dislike?

Reporting is a bit all over the place, Segmentation is competent but does require help/explaining for more complex tasks.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Pay for professional services. This is an easy to use tool which can be very comfortably self-taught, though for advance users, training would benefit.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

I really like that it is a visual designer, but that I can also customize code if I need.

What do you dislike?

I dislike the organization of the uploaded images. I can't keep or customize the settings that I use most often.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I really like the ease of use and that I am able to create custom code. This is really helpful overall. I've also been able to use the dynamic feature which has increased our customer experiences. The dynamic aspects are easy to use and set up as well.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I am able to generate a lot of revenue and add a lot to the user experience.

What do you like best?

The ability to drag and drop templates and modules. We can track open rates and everything clearly. Can preview for mobile and desktop. Can hide things for mobile or desktop

What do you dislike?

Very limited storage for assets. Everything revolves around module boxes with no simple graphic elements to help in design like lines o small boxes. When we need to create a simple grey line, we will have to create a grey box with width of 2px and then it was impossible to grab that line and move it elsewhere, or just edit it. Inability to incorporate jquery code. It is hard to create a seamless design with Bronto because everything is revolved around drag and drop boxes, so when we create it, things move around, some stuffs are too tight, some are too lose.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Enhancing business relationship with customers and boost sales

Response from Jennifer Stone of Bronto

Thanks for your feedback on how we can improve the Bronto Marketing Platform. We are listening and sent this feedback to our team. If you have any specific questions, please reach out to your AM. Thank you!

What do you like best?

I like the many options they have for connecting with customers. We have used the workflows for variety of email programs. We have set up a multi email Welcome program, as well as emails to obtain customer reviews that get triggered based on when the customer receives their items.

What do you dislike?

I can't really say that I have any specific dislikes. I do think that some of the add on products a little expensive.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I would recommend Bronto. I have used several services in the past and I think for the price Bronto is the best.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our Welcome program was a big problem. Previously we had no way of determining if someone had taken advantage of our special offer and therefore shouldn't be sent follow up emails. We have been able to track significant sales from those emails.

What do you like best?

The ability to house the product table in the platform was great. It let me see top performing products, percentage price changes, number of units sold, and revenue all in one section and would get updated daily with new sales

What do you dislike?

Very inflexible to bring in data. Had to come up with bandaid solutions to store date fields since several product fields were fixed and couldn’t be changed.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

One of my favorite features is the recommendations standard. I enter criteria that I want to have campaigns set up, and then it spits out a list of products that match that criteria that I can easily add to an email. For example, I can say create a list of products priced under $50 and have sold more than 1000 units and I could serve up the products that match this critieria into an email.

What do you like best?

I enjoy creating content tags that I can easily drag into emails when I need them. This is helpful because we use a lot of the same content in various emails. It's a time-saver.

What do you dislike?

I wish there was an easier way to compare and contrast all the winning subject lines among emails.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are working on our ability to create mass amounts of coupon codes so that we can utilize the coupon manager application. We realize that this application benefits us by limiting coupon code abuse and creating a sense of urgency with the code countdown timer.

What do you like best?

I enjoy the ease of creating emails. From my Photoshop files, to slices, and then just drag and drop in Bronto and I am good to go.

What do you dislike?

I would like just a few more options to help make layouts easier for mobile devices - nothing too fancy. The world is becoming mobile-first, so I would like to see more of that incorporated in Bronto. They have added the 'non-stacking' feature for columns, which has helped already!

Recommendations to others considering the product

Definitely weigh your options when it comes to finding an email platform best for your company. That's what we did, and Bronto works great for us - even collaborating with other programs we've got going on with other companies.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

Interface, reporting shortcomings (though moving in a great direction) - there are a couple of overview reports could include more information, but the information is there in a separate report.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Bronto is a less complicated but still highly capable ESP that relies on its ease of use, customized reporting, strategy and support to help you continue to grow your brand and connect with your audience. Abandoned Cart, Browse, Product Predictor and other industry initiatives are able to fully flourish at your fingertips with Bronto there to help either creatively and functionally, or as a great support team.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Revenue of course! All of these things come together perfectly to see where your strengths & weakness are.

What do you like best?

The platform is straightforward to use and handles the volume of email marketing campaigns the company produces with ease. I also really appreciate the support chat and our account manager for helping us whenever we have questions or problems.

What do you dislike?

While the updated dashboard for reporting looks nice, I prefer the previous reporting system for gathering and analyzing message data.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Bronto has helped us narrow down and execute on our email marketing strategy, while offering us insights to various tactics that have proven effective for reaching our engagement and email revenue goals.

What do you like best?

I like the ease of use of the software platform, the flexibility and diversity of the different kinds of emails that I can send, the ability to segment and report back on those segments, and the customer support.

What do you dislike?

Actually, there is nothing that I dislike about withe the Bronto platform or the interactions with the company.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Try it.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We needed an ESP that could handle high volume email campaigns, on a daily basis, with minimum downtime, and a short learning curve. Bronto has met, or exceeded, each of these requirements.

What do you like best?

The Bronto app has been a simple tool to use for email marketing. The ease of use and well organized user interface makes the daunting task of email planning and organizing much easier. We've found Bronto customer lists especially helpful with integrating our email lists into Facebook and other advertising platforms. If you have a solid strategy for your email marketing plan and just need a platform to execute, Bronto is a good choice!

What do you dislike?

The negative experience my employer and I have received in the past year or so from a strategist with the company. Prior to, our strategists have always been informative and helpful. Seems there may be a slight disconnect within associates in the last year or so with how to approach clients differently based on their customer base, and the associate's experience within the field of email marketing.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Bronto should be considered when you have a clear understanding of your customer base and are on the right track with your business's marketing goals as a whole. Bronto has a ton of great features outside of email marketing that can grow your business.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are using Bronto to automate email marketing. We've benefited from being able to have all types of email campaigns created, organized and delivered from one platform. The added bonus of being able to track the progress of each campaign separately, monthly, yearly or grouped however we see fit is a plus to simple using Google Analytics metrics.

What do you like best?

I really appreciate its technical flexibility in terms of being able to create custom tags, html, etc in the platform.

What do you dislike?

I have a really hard time with how user friendly the platform is. It does feel like unless you're a developer, it's difficult to perform even intuitive workflows.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

At this time in our business, we really want to roll out many tests to measure the effectiveness of our emails with revenue and engagement. The benefits are that we have a lot of options with our tests.

Response from Jennifer Stone of Bronto

Hi Shayma, thanks for taking the time to review Bronto. If we can help in anyway to with your workflows, please reach out to your AM. The Bronto Help tab can also help when you're in the BMP. The help tab contains links to the content that are relevant to the Bronto page you’re on. The content includes links to help topics, videos, page tours and guided walk throughs. To access Bronto’s Help Tab, click Help in the banner, and the Help Tab will slide open.

What do you like best?

The segmentation and automated workflow options have made a huge difference in our marketing campaigns and message to message metrics results.

What do you dislike?

Lack of needed reporting details in the New Reporting Tool. I need more options and flexibility in reporting to be capable of keeping track of all the things that I used to with the Legacy Reporting tools.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Using segmentation and lists to send to and exclude from a more appropriate amount of email to the right groups and thereafter, raising click and open rates.

What do you like best?

Easy to use admin pages. Easy to 'do it yourself' then, which we really like hands on control. Though, the support staff has always been Awesome in the past.

What do you dislike?

Price is high for what we use them for, but there are a fair bit of features that we don't use that they offer as part of the price.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Email marketing, triggered emails, tracking emails. Seeing all of the segmenting that we can do with our email lists is great. So many ways to test on sends and how to send them. We love analyzing how our emails perform. The testing on an email send really lets us get full value out of an email.

What do you like best?

Bronto is enormously powerful, and relatively easy to use. Sending capabilities are second to none! Automation is reliable, segmentation is pretty solid, and we never worry about sending. The drag and drop is good, and the mobile preview very useful. The built in Persado feature has been a real help when it comes to determining subject lines. Easy to stop and reschedule deliveries.

What do you dislike?

Our account management and training has been somewhat limited, and we've had three different account managers. Segmentation can feel a bit limited sometimes. Hosting feels very dated - it's a database style, and can be very unwieldy to find the resources required, as you have to search for what you need, then remove the search term in order to see your content. It's also very hard to tell what content is still in use in the hosting bank, and it can be tricky to delete things out without knowing if you're going to delete something vital! With the limited hosting space as well it can be hard to manage. Workflows are easy to overspecialise and then can be tricky to untangle. We've struggled with integration as well, but that's more down to the web system we're using than anything on the Bronto side.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Acceptable

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Automated emails are powerful and easy to maintain. Our revenue is consistent and provides a consistent traffic to our website.

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

- It would be great to have full detailed data for comparison report.The exported file all time data should have each day.

- There's should be an App (iPhone). Sometime I'm not at the office and I need to send an email or edit one.

- There's no an A/B testing for workflows. with this I'm not meaning Random filter and Interval filter inside workflows.

- You need better email templates. The actual ones are horrible.

- Why there is a limit in the user fields?

Recommendations to others considering the product

- Great customer service.

- Has workflows =)

- You can target your users with dynamical emails.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

- Increase sales and product quotes (in our case).

We realized that workflows are very powerful. You can segment your contacts and send them specific emails with specific content where they registered. Even we started to make an email per platform (Chrome Extension and App)

What do you like best?

How easy it is to set up and use. Also the reports

What do you dislike?

Haven't had any issues or things we dislike

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are looking for a service that is well rounded and can meet your needs, Bronto is who you should choose. They did much of the work for us and made the transition from our previous system very easy and pain free.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We now have better visibility to how our campaigns are performing. Cart abandonment is very big and successful for us.

What do you like best?

I like that I am able to easily modify/create workflows on my own. The workflow functionality is incredibly user friendly.

What do you dislike?

I don't like that I need to cancel a scheduled send in order to fix a typo in the subject line. I don't like that I cart information isn't saved at the contact level for clients using the Cart Recovery app. I don't like the glitches that often occur with the pop up app. I wish the pop up app had exit intent options and the ability to display different pop ups depending on the page you are on.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We like that Bronto is integrated with our ecommerce platform (Magento) so that we can easily implement things like cart recovery.

Response from Jennifer Stone of Bronto

Thanks for your feedback on how we can improve the Bronto Marketing Platform. We are listening and sent this feedback to our team. If you have any specific questions, please reach out to your AM. Thank you!

What do you like best?

Easy to understand interface/menus and the workflow tool is easy to understand

What do you dislike?

The new reporting interface is better, but it is still confusing to schedule reports.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Great for direct to consumer retailers and very reasonably priced.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Bronto to send marketing emails to our customers and other people who have inquired about our products. We tell them about sales, new products, and products they have left in their carts. We find that when we do this, they buy from us.

What do you like best?

Work flow provision and email scheduler also have good support for api including rest and Soap. The examples are good to implement the API. thanks

What do you dislike?

WE have several custom work flows which are kind of impossible to implement using the UI provided by bronto. Also the have to support everything using Rest APi because in now days no one is using Soap.

Recommendations to others considering the product

yes

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

I really like how easy it is to use. Before using Bronto, I didn't have a lot of email marketing experience. I was able to learn it quickly - especially with the help of training on-site. I also like the ability to integrate into other tools.

What do you dislike?

I dislike how expensive it is. I would love to implement a few more of the offerings - more pop-ups, etc, but we can't due to the price.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are solving segmentation problems. Before the recent few years, we weren't able to really segment our contacts and personalize our marketing. Now that we are able to, we have seen increased revenue and engagement.

What do you like best?

It's super stable - we never seem to have "emergency maintenance" like we did on my old platform. The workflows make it possible to do some automated campaigns. I like being able to merge contacts onto a list, for example, contacts who click a specific link in an email. That's pretty snazzy.

What do you dislike?

I'd like more than one "feeder" on a workflow. I'd like to be able to add an entire segment to a workflow (Rather than simply the contacts who get added to the segment).

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Automating email campaigns ( a no-brainer to me). We're running abandoned cart and other e-commerce email campaigns on one sub-account.

What do you like best?

I see the drag and drop builder as one of the most beneficial attributes Bronto has to offer us at Wisteria. Using the templates we have made for previous emails that are similar decrease the amount of time we spend per email. I also like the ease of use once it comes to linking our images to URLs on our site for redirecting - the drag and drop builder aids us in this endeavor so we got to eliminate the usage of dream weaver. We are now experimenting with specialized emails for certain targeted and segmented groups and Bronto has assisted us in the ease of these separations and segmentations.

What do you dislike?

I dislike how our website and bronto overlap and some of our customers have their emails recorded two times leading to an inconvenience to them. This mishap has been inconvenient due to the fact that we have to go through and weed out the duplicated emails which is tedious and time consuming.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Try to separate or correlate your email sign ups from your website with the ones in Bronto's software. We had a major duplication issue where customers emails were being recorded twice instead of once.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

By using Bronto we have been able to better track our email open rates and sign ups as well as the conversions from each email. We are currently working with Bronto to implement the usage of segmented and specially targeted groups within our database.

What do you like best?

Bronto's user interface is very intuitive, so it's easy to jump in and navigate. There's also so much control to build any type of program that you want, interweaving workflows with lists, segments, and field data. I've never had trouble accomplishing any type of personalized series or triggered workflow that I've conceived of. Exporting reports and message analytics is quick and simple, and allows for a lot of control over the time frame and type of data you're looking for.

What do you dislike?

Sometimes features may cost additional money to access (such as the new Socialite app). That being said, I've usually found them to be quite worth the investment in the long run.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Have a sales representative walk through the workflow capabilities--you will be impressed!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We're turning new customers into first time purchasers, and previous purchasers into repeat purchasers. We tailor Welcome Series for new subscribers depending on where they signed up; and then craft post-purchase series or replenishment series to increase conversions down the line. We run a full circle marketing strategy.

What do you like best?

The email marketing service was first rate. One of the easiest to use on the marketing, and offered easy setup for one-off emails, drip campaigns and auto responders.

What do you dislike?

When we used them, there was very little we disliked. When we needed more capability, however, we had to move on to a more full featured marketing automation system.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you want the Cadillac of email marketing systems, you want Bronto. If you want a full fledged marketing automation platform, Bronto wasn't there yet when we left their system for Pardot in December 2016.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We needed easily configured, professional marketing emails, that were far easier to manage than Constant Contact. Bronto streamlined our email process significantly and made it much easier to send marketing emails.

What do you like best?

My favorite feature about bronto is the automated workflows we can set up to trigger on certain events. Extremely helpful for segmenting our users.

What do you dislike?

My least favorite thing about Bronto is that if you want to create a workflow off orders, you need to use a 1 day delay node because bronto only crunches RFM metrics once every 24 hours.....This could cause some delays...

Recommendations to others considering the product

Sign up for the pop up form and coupon manager!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The ability to not have to figure out where our email sign ups are coming from without having to do much research. The reporting is nice.

What do you like best?

It's theoretically possible to create precise workflows for your communications, with complex if/then scenarios. The sales team absolutely convinced me that this was the most elegant available program for email marketing (but didn't mention the fact that our grant did not include any training or support whatsoever).

What do you dislike?

Creating a really attractive email newsletter within Bronto is nearly impossible if you're not a graphic designer. The container / content structure is like building with duplex Legos; a very linear stacking of columns and rows. If it's possible to wrap text tightly around an image or embed a video, I couldn't figure out how to do that. Very frustrating and disappointing. We paid a third party to help train us but still struggled with Bronto at every turn and ultimately are giving up on it.

Recommendations to others considering the product

You will need technical support and try actually creating a template for your email campaign before you commit to the platform.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I was hoping to make our communications more targeted, more personal, and therefore more effective. Although I know the platform can do that for me in theory, I was not able to figure out how to do it - and as I mentioned earlier, our grant offered zero support. That was the worst part - we had to pay a third party to help us, and were still not able to make this work for us. It was like the gift that kept on taking.

What do you like best?

The amount of options and functionalities available and the user friendly UI.

What do you dislike?

There are so many add-on tools, that make the product seem "outdated" without installing. Plus, the add-ons are not always cost effective.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Lay out not only what your business needs are but what your goals are for the future to really make sure your needs and goals match, get the facts - do the research - network with other users in similar industries - get the actual users opinions, not necessarily managers' assessment of tool.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

It's easy to use drag and drop system for creating emails.

What do you dislike?

The reporting leaves much to be desired. It covers the basics, but the ability to drill down and get to the information I want is not intuitive. Also, the way the blocks are designed limits my ability to be creative with my design without creating a graphics heavy email. For example, I'd love to be able to do a longer column on one side and several smaller columns on the other. It's not as clean to create this effect as is.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Emailing to my customers

Response from Jennifer Stone of Bronto

Thank you so much for your feedback! Are you famliar with Bronto Labs? We rebuilt reporting from the ground up, and it’s available in Bronto Labs, and are making frequent enhancements over time. Our goal was simple: Give Bronto customers fast access to insightful reporting metrics and visual trends while ensuring accuracy at every step. It’s included in your Bronto subscription. Simply log into your Bronto account, navigate to Settings > General > Bronto Labs and click the toggle to request access. For assistance with your Labs feature, contact Bronto Technical Support. We encourage you to share feedback on your experience with Labs features. We hope that helps, please reach out to us if you need help!

What do you like best?

I enjoy being able to create newsletters, email drip campaigns that show up in email and on mobile devices

What do you dislike?

There is nothing I dislike, because I am just really getting into using it

Recommendations to others considering the product

I am really getting used to it and have not used it enough to give reccomendations other to say what we wanted it to do is working great- Drip emails to manage our leads

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It is really helping with our leads- having an email drip that goes out every 2 days based on when each email is opened works fabulous. Also the way our Newsletter is displayed and distributed- we can tell who is opening or not, so when they are not following new procedures or behimnd on info- we can say- Read your newsleters-its all in there- excellent

What do you like best?

your chat system is fantastic. everyone I've worked with has been very nice and helpful.

What do you dislike?

I find it a bit difficult to navigate from the dashboard. I've never used bronto before and have used other esps like SailThru and Sales forces so their set up is just a bit different in terms of campaign organization and viewing data from campaigns.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are using bronto for automation and email marketing. I have not properly utilized the automation but I think in the long run it will help with bandwidth for our team.

What do you like best?

The container layout to build your newsletter/emails makes this software extremely simple to use. Dynamic content and the segmentation options truly make this software a NECESSITY to any company looking to grow their revenue.

What do you dislike?

I wish I had more hosting data but the amount received was agreed upon when signing the contract.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Takes a couple months to familiarize yourself with the software. And then an additional couple months to familiarize yourself with the automation/segmentation potential.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Reengaging current customers, soliciting product and business reviews, as well as segmenting customers based on buying habits.

What do you like best?

I like how we have the option of testing subject lines and get a full report after the email has sent so that we can track which emails and open times have the most success.

What do you dislike?

Bronto is not very user-friendly. For example, there are so many menu options/dropdowns etc that it can be hard to navigate and find what you're looking for. Adding people to a new segment/list takes awhile and overall it's just not the easiest to navigate. Constantly running out of storage space as well.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's good and has a lot of useful features, however, due to its ease (or rather lack of) usage, I would recommend it only if you have an employee dedicated to email marketing because I only do email marketing as part of my job and don't have the time to devote to fully exploring all the options Bronto offers.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We can isolate different groups of people from our lists to better target them, which has been very useful. We've benefited from being able to send emails only to contacts who have opened emails in x number of months, so our open rate greatly increased.

What do you like best?

Like the ease of setting up and creating workflows for triggered/automated campaigns

What do you dislike?

We do not have the ability to inject dynamic content and dynamic promo codes into emails currently. Perhaps these features are available and we are not utilizing them yet. I would like the ability to do more list segmentation and closer examination of list health.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We've built out a larger eCRM program utilizing bronto, which has helped continually bring subscribers back to the site to shop and absorb content

What do you like best?

i love the webinar bronto offers. they have great speakers and content. i try to watch as many as i can and they have helped me redesign my emails.

What do you dislike?

bronto is very slow, and im sure if its like that for everyone but i've used bronto at home and work so i don't think its a connection issue.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Try bronto, their interface is very easy to use and the webinars are really helpful!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

we have a small open rate and some trouble with gmail users so we've had a lot of help from bronto and we've tried other techniques to improve. Also we trying to develop stronger relationships with our first time customers and reengagement campaigns as well as our newsletter series is helping us do that.

What do you like best?

I love the workflows. They are very beneficial to making email flows easier to understand.

What do you dislike?

I don't love how the cart abandonment emails are set up. You have to create a custom API or set up and it's not easy to do.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Great for a small team!!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are solving our automated emails via where the customer is in the buying process. This makes it so much easier to set a workflow up vs having a manual email sent out for a particular months birthdays or coupon offer.

What do you like best?

What I like most about Bronto is how readily available email marketing results and report are. Prior to delivering an email, Bronto will instantly provide you with important reporting information such as open rate, click rate, bounce rate, etc. This information is very easy to find thanks to Bronto's Reporting tab as well as the brief delivery summaries Bronto provides next to each sent message.

What do you dislike?

What I dislike most about Bronto is the inability to manage multiple brands under one account. I currently manage all email marketing initiatives for two different brands and I have a Bronto account for each of them. Since the footer of the emails is programmed based on the account information entered into Bronto, and only accepts one business address, it makes it difficult to house two different brands/businesses under one account.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

For one of the brands I manage in particular, we have been really trying to increase our brand recognition. The user-friendly and robust environment of Bronto has allowed us to easily create and deliver messages to our clients and prospective clients. Bronto also allows us to set up automatic emails that send automatically when a consumer visits a certain part of our website - and in return, this allows us stay in front of our customers.

What do you like best?

The drag and drop editor allows for a marketer to create emails rather than a technical expert, the journeys can be seen clearly in the workflows and the reporting is nicely laid out.

What do you dislike?

There are quite a lot of glitches which I have had to report to live chat and they are often not able to assist and take a while to respond. The browse recovery app is quite difficult to use in the sense that you can't preview how things will look whilst creating them.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The welcome journey and abandoned cart have improved in terms of revenue and it has allowed us to easily segment our data.

What do you like best?

I like that the platform is easy to use and how it automatically takes care of your email marketing.

What do you dislike?

Half of my team is unable to use Brinto because there seems to be an issue with the system not loading when you log in. You just get spinning wheels of death. Sometimes clearing cookie history solves the issue, sometimes it doesn't - either way I've had clients on hold for way too long trying to find their info in this broken system.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Easy access to all of our marketing emails, the ability to see what we've sent a client, when, when they opened it and even when a link was clicked.

What do you like best?

I love that you can easily test (A/B and Champion/Challenger) email messages; you can stop an email deployment; and there are no mysteries when using exclusions (I've had issues with other EMS...). I also love being able to speak with their support team via the chat feature.

What do you dislike?

It would be great to see all assets for an email campaign in one place - especially because we continuously run into list capacity issues. It would be easier to delete old assets - this includes the media library. I wish there was not a limit for hosting images, but I understand why.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This was intuitive and easy to learn. It is great for sending a high volume of emails - especially to large lists.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketing automation and segmentations are the future/now -- I think Bronto could improve in this area. I definitely appreciate the ability to integrate our other systems with Bronto. We currently use 2 different EMSs because neither has the full functionality we are looking for (and it's still not enough!).

What do you like best?

I love how many reports are available in Bronto. There's literally a report for any KPI you could want.

What do you dislike?

While there are tons of reports, they can be a little difficult to find at times.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Segmentation and A/B testing are much easier on this platform than previous platforms I've used. It's help us generate optimal content for our customer base, resulting in a higher-than-average conversion rate from our email campaigns.

What do you like best?

Bronto is a comparable marketing tool to Mailchimp and Constant Contact with a ecommerce focus and highly developed in that space.

What do you dislike?

It is far too complicated to manage constituents in the system and segment them. I also think that Bronto is lacking on the creative side. It doesn't currently provide us with ready-to use or customizable templates. Its competitors do. I also dislike that it doesn't connect with my institution's database so the maintenance of date between the two is currently done manually.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are in the e-commerce arena, this is a fabulous product to use and track conversions.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Email marketing. It does a decent job of delivering the content to the end user.

What do you like best?

The platform is very user friendly and intuitive. I like that the data from my emails sends is readily available and easy to export.

What do you dislike?

I find that it can be hard to navigate through the FAQ at times.

Recommendations to others considering the product

There are a lot of options to use with Bronto like the Browse and Cart recovery apps. I recommend listing out the goals you have for your email program and working with your account manager to see what additional services are going to benefit your company.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are capturing additional revenue with both the Browse and Cart recovery apps. That's potential lost revenue without those follow-up emails.

What do you like best?

I like that Bronto can create email workflows

What do you dislike?

Numbers are always off. I can't look back at historical data for segments (i.e. see how much a segment has grown). I feel like I pull different numbers every time I try to export some things. There are lots of bugs on the website. The visuals can definitely be updated. I can't rely on Bronto when I pull the same metrics from Google Analytics and they are completely different.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use email marketing for our clients. It's been helpful being able to segment inactive users and send automated messages to them.

What do you like best?

When we first started on Bronto, we had difficulty finding some of the features promised. But the Success team has been very good at helping us implement multiple new features that make it easier for us to launch and track email campaigns.

What do you dislike?

Other platforms seem more integrated into 3rd party tools.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

i like that there are containers to use and building an email template is easy. Especially for people with no web background they can use it.

What do you dislike?

I don't like the fact that if i already have an email template that is coded via html i cant transfer it directly to bronto since bronto uses its own coding, so i have to convert to bronto coding which takes time and is difficult.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Good for new start-up businesses with no email templates

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We like that drop off emails are now sent automatically because of the workflows and our email opens have increased.

Learning about Bronto?

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